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Cloudflare serves as a reverse proxy for your website when Cloudflare services, particularly the CDN feature, are enabled for a domain. As a result, every visitor's IP becomes hidden to the origin server, the location where your website is hosted, because it is Cloudflare's servers that request data from the origin server for each visitor.

For this reason, functionality in any web application you use, including Vanilla Forums, that provides logging of each user's IP address will show Cloudflare servers' IP addresses instead. Cloudflare passes in additional headers that you can use to get around this issue. These headers can be set in either the web server or the web application layer.

This plugin detects when a Cloudflare server is making a request to the origin server and modifies the standard way that a user's IP address is retrieved with one of those additional headers in order to show the user's actual IP address.

@Shadowdare said:
Cloudflare serves as a reverse proxy for your website when Cloudflare services, particularly the CDN feature, are enabled for a domain. As a result, every visitor's IP becomes hidden to the origin server, the location where your website is hosted, because it is Cloudflare's servers that request data from the origin server for each visitor.

For this reason, functionality in any web application you use, including Vanilla Forums, that provides logging of each user's IP address will show Cloudflare servers' IP addresses instead. Cloudflare passes in additional headers that you can use to get around this issue. These headers can be set in either the web server or the web application layer.

This plugin detects when a Cloudflare server is making a request to the origin server and modifies the standard way that a user's IP address is retrieved with one of those additional headers in order to show the user's actual IP address.

If VanillaForums gives me the correct IP address on my user list then I don't need this plugin?

@ItsVizionTv said:
If VanillaForums gives me the correct IP address on my user list then I don't need this plugin?

If you're using Cloudflare and your users have their correct IP addresses without the plugin enabled, it's likely that your host already has Cloudflare headers being used in the web server or Cloudflare services aren't enabled for your domain.

In any case, there's nothing to be worried about if your users have their correct IP addresses. Keeping the plugin enabled while using Cloudflare could only help and won't hurt, too.